Early Career Work in Progress Seminar (Tuesday - Week 1, MT26)

Abstract: In Brown v Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court of the United States struck down racially segregated schooling on the basis that it ‘generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone’. Similar reasoning has since been found in defences of antidiscrimination law in the work of contemporary legal theorists (Siegel, NeJaime, Singer, Sepper) and philosophers (Khaitan, Sangiovanni, Sanguilano, Wilson). In these theories, antidiscrimination law is justified by how it can secure self-respect for some group. Self-respect is the psychological value of recognising one’s own equality and dignity as a member of one’s society.

In this paper I argue that the value of self-respect is an implausible explanation for antidiscrimination law. It is not necessary to justify antidiscrimination law because discrimination need not involve threats to or loss of self-respect. I'll also argue that self-respect is unlikely to be sufficient to justify antidiscrimination law. Psychological internalisation of discrimination's effects or messages simply seems redundant, and focusing on self-respect risks obscuring or diluting a widely-recognised function of antidiscrimination law to 'crowd out' objectively inferiorising messages irrespective of uptake. Further, self-respect is too abstemious a value to justify the grounds and scope of antidiscrimination law as it stands and as we think it should stand in liberal democracies today. Self-respect might well justify affirmative action or social equality policies, but not antidiscrimination law.

Registration: If you do not hold a university card, please contact the seminar convenor or admin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk at least two working days before a seminar to register your attendance.

If you are interested in presenting, please get in touch with Rebecca Rowson (rebecca.rowson@chch.ox.ac.uk)

_{Workshop in Early Career Work in Progress Convenor: Rebecca Rowson}